Plate I — the basement, after midnight.
The machine at rest.
Two budding jazz musicians share a house not far from the college they attend on scholarship in a drab Navy town outside of Seattle. A creative community is unwittingly ignited — adding color to the landscape & a renaissance despite the gravity of a blue-collar world.
Spring of 2000, almost finals week at Olympic College, & the music department lounge is full of students before Jazz Band rehearsal — horns blowing faintly from the practice rooms down the hall. Around the oval table sits a cross-section of a town: kids fresh out of high school, & guys who used to be in the Navy band, back on the G.I. Bill.
One of them lives in a 1973 Volkswagen bus, busks the Bainbridge ferry for a hundred & fifty a day, hosts the Wednesday open mic at a dive with crooked floors, & hauls a late-1940s Remington portable everywhere he goes. He is going to spend the next year turning a shipyard town into a scene.
The book is written entirely in dialogue — built to be heard. Every scene carries a tune. Play it in order & you have a record.
Not a prop & not a metaphor. In this book the typewriter is cast, credited & played: it keeps time behind the poems, it goes on stage at the dive bar, & it gets its own name in the title.
I'm writing a bunch & doing this crazy art thing using this typewriter I call the tingg* Machine as not only the esthetic of the project but also a central character. Bub — Act I, Scene 5
Your typewriter seems to be its own character. — That's exactly it. I seem to take on another persona when my fingers are pounding away on that thing. Dr. Hong & Bub — Act II, Scene 5
"Every lick, every arpeggio, every space, every color, & texture… Everything." — T.J., Act II, Scene 2
Cascading cups of caffeinated concentrate Drip de la drip Crème de la crème Packed tight portafilter Handy shots to shoot it down Round wound & up I go, free to flow This juice in my veins Sammy Hagar high Can't cry when it rains With bebop jazz & espresso addictions —leaving little turd-colored cakes
Tighten up those baselines I feel fine Ears sweet like that fifth glass of wine Snappin' & poppin' Shakin' up the love in your jazz skillet Tappin' on those tapping keys It's not me—heee's left speechless After the bow solo — Sooo Lowww OH— Ray Brown Blues
I wanna stick my head
In the middle of that horn circle
Clock time telling one to drink coffee
& stay up late—but after you've done everything
you can think of to do
You go to bed
But you can't sleep
Because of all that caffeine running 'round in your veins
Keeping your lids locked open
To run with Wiley coyotes in the desert
Covered with checkerboard chairs
Inviting one to sit with trinkets and things that sparkle—
[…]
It feels like my boat sank and I had to abandon ship swim to shore, dance barefoot up the beach over barnacled rocks to stand shivering wet at the steps of a bougie waterfront house knocking on the back door praying for the kindness of strangers
Poet, guitar player, ferry busker, open-mic host, & for one particular year, the guy who lived in a Volkswagen bus & carried a typewriter into every room he entered.
Bub self-published three hand-made books in the span of the story you're about to hear — cut with scissors & a glue stick, set in the font of a late-forties Remington, sold for five bucks a copy on the Seattle–Bainbridge run. He fronted a band called Spoken Jazz, playing the typewriter, & made a room full of drinkers in a crooked-floored dive go so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Twenty years after the last one came off the machine, an intern was clearing out the old walk-in freezer at Kukuau Studio in downtown Hilo — a bakery once, a storage & isolation room now — & found a sealed manila envelope. It was addressed to Bub. It was postmarked 2003.
Inside were all three books, looking like they'd come from Kinko's that morning. He had forgotten mailing them. He had forgotten the envelope existed at all, filed badly in a stack of notebooks & clippings that followed him across an ocean.
The third one he had given up for lost fifteen years earlier, after being pressured into throwing the original manuscripts into a dumpster.
What you can buy now is those three books, set as one volume for the first time — kept as typed, vulgarity & all. Everything else on this page is the work that grew out of opening that envelope.
Have you ever received a gift from your former self? Bub Pratt — Author's Note
Coffee-shop poems, road stories & typewriter rants, written between 2001 & 2003 on those little marble memo pads & the machine itself. Three hand-made books, set as one volume for the first time.
The audiobook is Bub reading the poems himself. The musical is a different animal & it doesn't exist yet — a full cast, a score, about seven hours of radio built to be heard, & his first jazz record alongside it. The book came out first on purpose: it pays for the rest, & that part is being funded now.
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